I read Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey only after we'd hiked in Arches National park in July.

The book formed my reward for a long day's walk. The book and a pizza. One cannot live on books alone.

The bookstore on the main drag of funky Moab, Utah (Back of Beyond Books) naturally, features the work of Abbey, who worked as a ranger in the area in the late 1950's.

Abbey wrote this about Arches National Park: ​"The air is so dry here I can hardly shave in the mornings. The water and soap dry on my face as I reach for the razor: aridity. It is the driest season of a dry country. In the afternoons of July and August we may get thundershowers but an hour after the storms pass the surface of the desert is again bone dry."​Desert Solitaire, p 142.

A fleeting puddle along the Devil's Garden Trail.

We started the Devil's Garden trail at 6:30 perhaps –– the sun was up, but the shadows were long when we left the paved trail at Landscape Arch. ​​Bonus travel tip: Even in the busiest and most popular national parks, we found that by hiking a few hundred yards down nearly any trail*, we could leave most of the seething mass of vacationing humanity behind.

Sad truth: few tourists do more than meander to overlook, snap a photo, and then roar off in an air-conditioned car.

Edward Abbey was right: "What can I tell them? Sealed in their metallic shells like molluscs on wheels, how can I pry the people free? The auto as tin can, the park ranger as opener."​Desert Solitaire p 290.

*Exception to the trail rule? The Narrows at Zion. It was kind of the only game in town after the landslides of 2018 (aside from scaling bare rock faces). That hike –– a wet, awe-inspiring meander up the slot canyon –– did fill up considerably come lunchtime. Early morning or off-season recommended.

So, back to the dusty devilly trail.

Devil's Garden trail is nearly 8 miles there-and-back again. A good scramble up red sandstone rocks, along ledges, through dusty piñon pine groves. We ran into families of deer –– the females showing ribs and the fawns leggy and curious –– a couple of parties of human hikers, lizards of various stripe, intriguing tracks in the sand, and the odd path marker.

​Some markers odder than others. To a certain sort of thinker, this is an ambiguous sign:

I read it first as a series of nouns: road + leaf + laundry.

Clearly wrong.

A series of verbs: follows + goes + cleans.

Er, nope. Because, you know, why? But interesting. Return to this thought later, I told myself, tucking the camera back into my pocket.

I stopped for a sip of water a hundred or two hundreds yards later. The words transposed themselves: Trail Wash Leaves.

That seemed nearly probable: maybe the trail had a new name. The National Park people seem to engineer their signage so that visitors can have a more genuine park experience, complete with navigational anxiety and an understanding that maps are imperfect representations of the truth.

Maybe. But probably not.

It's a long walk, and I kept puzzling over these three peculiar words. Wash. Trail. Leaves. Perhaps I was a little dehydrated, guzzled gallons of water notwithstanding.

Most human language follows a predictable formula: Noun verbs an Object. Dog bites man. Woman reads book about a desert.

Leaves. Trail. Wash.

​

The pieces fitted together a half mile or more later: Alert, hikers: your trail, which has followed the path of this dried stream-bed –– known locally as a wash or a gulch –– is about to diverge from the stream-bed.

Oh. That.

Huh.

For the rest of the walk, series of words started presenting themselves. Triangular structures, each side a simple word that goes both ways: One can trail one's hand on the trail. One can leave the leaves behind, one can wash the wash.

Stone Ride Ice.Rein Plant SaddleMount Slide Hollow.Chant Riddle Stop.

Then we arrived back at the start of the trail.

And in the blink of an eye, we were addressing ourselves to pizza and cold beverages and a bookstore on the funky little main drag of Moab.

The warm breeze carrying the scent of seaweed, or pine, or fresh-cut grass clippings.

And some books.

I had the enviable job for a while of reviewing new books for the erstwhile Tampa Tribune. I'd go into my editor's office with a big empty LL Bean tote and then stagger out like a bookwormy donkey. I'd review books that I liked and ditch the ones I didn't. As a job, it didn't pay very well, but I did get to keep the books.These days, I don't gobble up piles of reading material. Even with the bounty of the public library easily within reach, good books seem thin on the ground. When I do find one, I wish I were still writing reviews. Word of mouth only goes so far.And hence, a couple of summer reading recommendations.

If you are a fan of Stephen King's apocalyptic masterpiece The Stand, let me humbly suggest Joe Hill's The Fireman.

The parallels –– each a brick-sized opus with a New England setting, a fatal plague devastating the country, a pregnant heroine –– are entertaining but not distracting. Both books take place in the near future and tackle deceptively complicated moral dilemmas –– as is the wont in apocalyptic fiction.

The disruption of society in Stephen King's The Stand sets the stage for a showdown with capital-letter Evil in the form of Randall Flagg. In The Fireman, the enemy is less showy (not a Big Bad, as Buffy would say), which gives Hill's suspense an edge: what does victory look like when the evil is not separate?Hill's take on the calamity is not a super-flu but a fungal plague that sets its victims on fire. His descriptions are vivid, his pacing brisk (hold on!), and the characters reveal themselves with a nice, writerly economy.

Hill's novel also offers plenty of cool cultural references*, and it's worth noting that Hill is the son of King –– a fact he didn't make public until he had himself earned a little success.

If you've never read The Stand, that's your other half of summer reading about the end of the world.

​What? You don't like speculative fiction?

Really?

Even though I think all fiction is to some extent speculative fiction, okay, okay.

​Try Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett.

It's not fiction at all but the memoir of the author's friendship with Lucy Grealy. Grealy, of course, wrote the Autobiography of a Face about her lifelong struggle with facial cancer, facial reconstructive surgery, and a longing to be more than her own appearance. Patchett is the award-winning novelist who wrote Bel Canto, The Year of Wonders, and Commonwealth.

Grealy and Patchett attended Sarah Lawrence at the same time and then were thrown together more or less by chance as roommates at the Iowa Writer's program.

Their friendship is marked by contrasts: mercurial, feckless Lucy and methodical Ann, both ambitious writers, so very unlike one another, and yet...and yet. Thereby hangs the tale.

Patchett tells the story with the kind of unflinching honesty that at first shocks: chapter one introduces us to Grealy as she embarks on sexual adventure with a repellent older man.

Patchett's affection for Grealy, however, carries her readers beyond this to the enduring camaraderie and deep understanding that makes a friendship extraordinary.

I take it as a recommendation for the book that it was the source of quite a kerfluffle when assigned as the freshman reading book at Clemson University. (Friendship between girls not a suitable topic, evidently.) Likewise, I admire Patchett's sensible, kind approach to all things literary (just found her blog. Dang, she really is cool).

"We were a pairing out of an Aesop's fable, the grasshopper and the ant, the tortoise and the hare. And sure, maybe the ant was warmer in the winter and the tortoise won the race, but everyone knows that the grasshopper and the hare were infinitely more appealing animals in all their leggy beauty, their music and interesting side trips. What the story didn't tell you is that the ant relented at the eleventh hour and took in the grasshopper when the weather was hard, fed him on his tenderest store of grass all winter. The tortoise, being uninterested in such things, gave over his medal to the hare. Grasshoppers and hare find the ants and tortoises. They need us to survive, but we need them as well. They were the ones who brought the truth and beauty to the party, which Lucy could tell you as she recited her Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day."

One of my favorite nephews was helping me shuffle boxes of stuff from one place to the other recently. With that mix of patience and impatience native to the under-20 crowd, he did not express the slightest flicker of curiosity.

Still, his doubtful expression as he slid the carton (Marked "A-16") into the back of the Honda made me want to explain a little.

"I haven't unpacked that box since before your Uncle Jeff and I got married," I ventured. Which would make it the equivalent to the Jazz Age to him. "Toss it!" he said, then, reluctantly, "Why?""Because there was space?" I said. "Because I never got around to it?""Huh," he said. "Welp, that's the last of the pile. Anything else?"

There wasn't, except my continuing impulse to explain. And of course my own curiosity.

​I hadn't unpacked the box -- or possibly even peeked into it –– for a very long time.

​Under a layer of yellowed St. Petersburg Times packing paper, an old acquaintance gazed back at me.

Wide Wide World was the first real bestseller in the U.S. Published in 1850, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. And then, for a couple of solid reasons, it disappeared from most people's memories.

Why was it forgotten? Here's the short list:1) It's a "woman's" book, which critics and scholars later tended to dismiss. What's a "woman's book"? Well, the short form is that, like Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford novels, The Wide Wide World is focused on a heroine within the limited sphere of house and hold.

2) Like Little Dorritt or The Shack, the book offers a lot of weeping. Sentimentality is all well and good, but like unhappy families, I think every generation needs its own sentimental novel. Bridges of Madison County, anyone? Jonathan Livingston Seagull?

It's almost as if the reading public wrings the emotion out of a popular book, leaving a dry husk for the next wave of readers. Or not. It's just a theory.

3) The novel is long and it's deeply and relentlessly religious –– 592 didactic pages about Christians and their duties.

​Our pre-teen heroine's duty boils down to how her sufferings are the will of God and how she needs to submit to the will of the men in her circle in order to find a happy ending...Think just a touch of Shades of Grey mixed with all the light-hearted fun of Bunyon's Pilgrim's Progress.

Goodreads reviews are sprinkled with phrases like "patriarchy by proxy" and "accepting male dominance" and the book is described (fairly) as "preachy," "stifling," and "horrid."

Sidebar data:The author Susan Warner collaborated with her sister Anna on several novels.

Thanks to one of those collaborations, Say and Seal, we have the hymn "Jesus Loves Me," so popular with the Sunday School crowd.

​

So it's not a book that is going to have a revival, like Beryl Markham's West with the Night*. It's not a book I'm going to read again, ever. But I don't want to forget it. And so it has waited in a cardboard box lo these many years.

Wide Wide World essentially fired up the country's book publishing industry. The novel was huge. It outsold David Copperfield in England.

But Susan Warner did NOT make a fortune from it. She and her sister started writing after their father lost all the family money in the panic of 1837. The girls were poor and writing was their best option to keep body and soul together. They managed, but they did not enjoy the life of bestselling authors. Susan went on to publish a book a year until her death at age 66. The Warner sisters have been mostly forgotten.

Mostly: they did manage to pass along their family property, Constitution Island, to the US Military Academy at West Point. The island is part of the campus, although their house (Warner House, natch) is presently in a state of disrepair.

When asked, many of the manly American men writers of their day used to claim that writing is easy. You just open a vein.

(Versions of the quote come from sportswriter Red Smith, sportswriter and novelist Paul Gallico, wordy novelist Thomas Wolfe, and his High-T Manliness Himself –– Ernest Hemingway. Thanks Garson O'Toole for this blog all about it.)

Um, okay, boys. Not for nothing, but bleeding is a lot easier.

That said, I've been away from my notebook and pen for a stretch. I actually forgot to bring paper on the month-long trip to the farm.

At least half-a-dozen things are tugging at my time right now. Any one of them is more pleasant and easeful than working on that novel.

I face a hefty amount of preparatory coaxing and girding up of the loins, bargaining and carrot-and-sticking, all in the interest of getting words to start flowing.

Which opens the door to the real the question: why write at all. Why not just not write? Get the other things on my list done. Retire or whatnot.

I would, actually, if I could.

So far I have failed to give it up. I've alluded to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner a time or two; it's that poem with the old guy pestering people at a wedding, insisting that he tell them HIS story –– that's a pretty good illustration of what goes on over here.

And yet, despite characters shouting and raising their hands frantically in the back of my skull-duggery room and a good playlist cued up, I am dipping into Reynold Price's wonderful Learning a Trade: A Craftsman's Notebooks 1955-1997. It's an annotated journal that gives me hope: in it, Price writes about his process. He dithers and wonders about his characters' motivations and choices. He revisits and re-considers his own moral position based on the things his characters do –– or what they must do, whether he wants them to do or not.

Price was a young man at start of these notebooks studying and writing in Oxford and then back in North Carolina, before he wrote A Long and Happy Life, his first novel. By the end, he's had a has successful career, including Kate Vaiden, and a dozen other novels, as well as screenplays and short stories, books with a biblical bent, and volumes of memoir.

Here's a sample from page 77 of Learning a Trade.

20 January 1957 LONDONBut look, isn't this story in danger of ending with a kind of cheat, that is with no resolution? What is the end going to imply?: simply that she leaves home for Norfolk or wherever? Maybe Wesley had better make some kind of gesture, however small.

And page 129:27 August 1960, DURHAM Rosacoke has told Wesley her pregnancy. His only reaction has been silence –– then question: has she known anyone else? Then simply telling her to come on, they must practice. Her own feeling through the revelation is chiefly numbness, tiredness –– though Wesley notices on her face the same look that was there on the November night (which was described then as hate).

I haven't read the story in question, and may never do so. Can't say I am want to know about Wesley and Rosacoke. What's interesting –– and heartening –– is that Price clearly spent a good portion of his waking life playing with his paper dolls, too, imagining an inner life for these imaginary friends, worrying about their actions and what it all means.

So many stories start off with a interesting set-up, but then turn in to the same-old same-old:

An under-appreciated gal finds love and a glamorous makeover.The unreliable narrator turns out to be hiding a truth worse than you think at first.Square-jawed hero will decode the ages-old secret before the collapse of civilization.Freakishly clever serial killer will do awful things and then get caught, except he will escape in the last paragraph.

Don't get me wrong, these books can be delightful.

​But we like surprises, we people do. Which might be why I have enjoyed this book so much.

The Bride's Farewell starts with a girl running away from home the morning she's to wed. It's 1850-something, and Pell takes some food, the coins meant as her dowry, her beloved horse and, then, as she starts off, finds that her silent little brother, Bean, refuses to be left behind.

Like many another character before her, Pell is different from her dirt-poor family, from other girls, from what society expects.

It's not just her unwillingness to settle down and marry the local boy she's known her whole life. It's not just her fear of ending up like her mother, exhausted and wrung-out from endless childbearing and grinding disappointment.

No, Pell is good with horses –– really good –– and she hopes to use this skill to make her own way through the world. But she does not quite reckon on the difficulties she'll face with people.

The Bride's Farewell is full of surprises and twists that make perfect sense in hindsight (like all the best fiction). Pell's insight into the thoughts of animals (matched by her lack of insight into the thoughts of humans) is utterly convincing and thought-provoking.

At 214 pages, it's easy to down in a single sitting, but Rosoff's stylistic strengths (the writing is vivid and restrained, with only the best details filled in) bear re-reading. Now go to your local and read it.

"Chapter 2The open road. What a trio of words. What a vision of blue sky and untouched hills and narrow trails heading God knew where and being free––free and hungry, free and cold, free and wet, free and lost. Who could mourn such conditions, faced with the alternative?"

It wasn't intentional, but I read two memoirs back-to-back last summer. Each was written by a clever youngish white American woman, each describing the choices that set her on an unusual path, each was thoughtful and entertaining –– but how different one from the other!

But books are not like friends –– where I might weigh the quirks in one against the charms of another when planning a night on the town or a weekend road-trip. Nope, books will just wait peaceably until you have time to get together. And they rarely squabble.

The Dirty Life is a memoir that dives right into the hard choices that bring a person to discover her life's work.

A New York writer, Kristin Kimball went to interview a pioneering young farmer in Pennsylvania for a magazine story.

At the forefront of a movement in local, organically sourced food, the young farmer captivated her. In a few short months, she is ready to give up her tiny Manhattan apartment for the "dirty life" of working a small farm in Northern New York.

This story about life in sustainable agriculture is not without its moments of humor, but it's a serious story about someone finding her purpose.

​If this book were a friend, it would be that smart one who is passionate about topic you don't know, but who is open-hearted and more than willing to teach you.

The one who's not always comfortable to be around, but who is inspiring and just plain interesting.

​

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, however, would be the kind of friend who makes you laugh even as your life is falling apart around you. The sort of pal you want others to love, even though you also –– a little –– want to keep her all to yourself.

Rhoda Janzen starts the story with a series of really dreadful disasters including a terrible car wreck and the desertion of her husband for "a guy named Bob from Gay.com." An English professor and poet in Michigan, she ends up back with her parents in California.

But these aren't just parents, these are Mennonite parents. Don't know Mennonites? Well, Janzen, who had long since left the church and community, is glad to tell you.

And you will be glad she does. Just be careful about –– as my actual friend Lois says –– snotting coffee all over yourself. The book is that funny. And pity the person sitting next to you calmly watching Sports Center, because he is going to have to listen to you read aloud some of these wonderful paragraphs as you chuckle and wipe up spilled coffee.

It wasn't original when Shakespeare put on the show. But a person has to wonder how many –– so many! –– different ways can storytellers present that sad tale of star-crossed lovers...

The kids can be members of rival gangs in Spanish Harlem, they can be old people, they can be soldiers. Maybe they survive and have a happy ending. Maybe they burst into spontaneous song and dance. Perhaps Romeo and Juliet work at the same diner. They can be a dog and a cat, they can be, oh hell, garden gnomes, or, surprisingly good in a novel as a zombie and a warm-blooded girl.

Creativity isn't about creating something from nothing. It's like recombinant DNA, picking up a little bit of this and merging it with a little bit of that. Sometimes you get an awkward chimeric failure, other times, a handsome mule of a hybrid.

Which plots (or songs) prove most inspirational? That's a whole other question.

The first Russian novel that I really enjoyed came from a friend who included an index card listing the names of the characters, including their various nicknames and honorifics.

Turns out that Russian names really are complicated. Alexander becomes Sasha. Also Alexi. And something like Alexandrushka among friends. Or they might call him Ivanovich, because that's his middle name. Another time, the same guy is referred to as Alexander Ivanovich or Alexander Dolohkov. Dolohkov being his last name, although the reader has probably long forgotten it. And so on. The index card was both a kindness and a necessity.

It's a little the same with boats. That triangular sail at the front of the boat?

​Called a headsail, a jib, a foresail, a genoa (or "jenny" between friends), an overlapping jib, a 130%, a number 1, a trysail. Or maybe it's a jenniker or a code zero. So many terms for what's at heart the very same thing.

Of course there are technical differences between them. A genoa is gennoally bigger than a jib (see that? I slay myself!), A trysail is usually the smallest possible headsail, saved for the windiest of conditions.

Does it matter what you call it? Kind of no, but kind of yes. It's the difference between a socket wrench and a open-ended one. A pencil or a pen. A steak knife or a cleaver.

In this case, here's a video clip of Spawn from the 2016 Everglades Challenge. The boat is winging along under jib and main. ​​

Think "farm" and there it is, just as bright and crisp as the photo on a feed-store calendar: a vision of tidy fences, a neat rows of crops, clean animals placidly munching lush pastures.

It's nothing new, nothing unique, this pretty ideal. Classical Romans and Greeks cherished the image of pastoral beauty. They made a whole genre of it. The <ahem> Pastoral.

Still, it's a long way between ideal and actuality: even leaving out the amount of salty sweat and hard work, there's just so much to learn in transforming a lapsed dairy farm into something that feels like The Farm.

Take even a short wander across one of the meadows, and the questions follow one on the other, like hungry livestock rushing the trough:

What is the name of that crazy-singing bird that perches the dead elm tree?

What does that bird eat?

Should we put up birdhouses by the old barn foundation?

And how OLD is that iron plough that Mr. Linton just unearthed from inside the foundation?

Consult the Google? Well, my phone is not that smart, and besides, I enjoy taking a break from the lure of online research while at the Farm. Plus, she noted galactically, my solar system is not finished, so the battery must be conserved.

Old style. The bookshelf starts to groan under the weight of curiosity:

This reference shelf in turn gives me more fodder (ooh! a farming metaphor!) for agricultural day-dreams and even more blathering on, as I begin to realize how vast is my ignorance...

*Pasternak? Almanack? I don't know, I guess I'm still working on my Cockney rhyming slang. Or perhaps it's a homonym (a word that does not, honestly, have a gay subtext) with "pasteurize" or possibly, (to complete the full circle of piffle!), with "pasture."

Born in 1825, this son of a sailmaker* went to Harvard on scholarship and later put his passion into studying and collecting the folk songs of Scotland and England. Starting in 1882, he published ten volumes of English and Scottish Ballads with notes and side-by-side commentary about multiple versions of 305 songs.

He categorized the ballads by theme ("Supernatural Beings," "Tragic Other than Love," "Humor," etc.) and numbered them. For example, Child #26 is "The Twa Corries" also "The Three Ravens," a song from before 1600 about carrion birds discussing their future meal of the body of a fallen knight.

Child #39 is "Tam Lin," which has a dozen versions of the story in which a spunky maiden must save the handsome human knight she loves from his doom as a prisoner of the court of Elfland. Some may remember Sandy Dennys of Fairport Convention singing it. The story of Janet (or Margaret, depending on the version) and her knight has inspired a handful of recent novels, including two that I like very much:

Tam-Lin by Pamela Dean is a novel about being an English major. The main character, Janet, goes to a small liberal arts college in Minnesota, where she does a lot of reading before noticing that her boyfriend is in thrall to the Queen of Elfland and only she can rescue him.

It's not a book for everyone. It's a story that idealizes the undergrad experience and luxuriates in literary references, so for certain nerdy bookworms, it's intoxicating.

Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones is a novel for younger readers (think Harry Potter rather than, say Beezus and Ramona) that sets the Tam Lin story in suburban Britain. It begins when Polly, home from college, is looking through her childhood things and suddenly begins to remember a second set of memories.

It's a race against time as she tries to understand what happened to a musician named Tom Lynn who was very important to her as a kid -- before the rather awful and mesmerizing Laurel, who holds court next door and who has a penchant for young musicians, sends him to his doom.

It's funny and suspenseful and –– like so many of Jones' novels –– very cleverly plotted. As I lift the book from my shelf, I see that I purchased it from The Strand Bookstore for $2.

Chosen simply because it was published by Greenwillow Books, which was then run by one of my publishing idols, Susan Hirschman, it has been a happy find and a great bargain.